Your site has been live for several months. You have published content, you have optimised your pages, but your organic traffic is not really taking off. Before rebuilding everything, check the technical foundations first. An invisible problem such as a page blocked from indexing or duplicate content can neutralise all your content work.
What Google has to be able to do on your site
To rank you, Google goes through three stages on your site: it crawls it, it understands it and it indexes it. If one of those stages is blocked, your page will never appear in the results. A badly configured robots.txt file, a forgotten noindex tag or an excessive loading time can create that blockage with no visible error message at all.
The 5 points to check first
- Indexing: open Google Search Console and read the 'Pages' tab. It tells you how many pages are indexed and why the others are excluded.
- Duplicate content: if two URLs show very similar text, Google has to choose which one to display. Use a canonical tag to tell it which is the reference version.
- 404 errors: every missing page is a lost opportunity. Identify the URLs in error and redirect them to the right destination.
- Title tags and meta descriptions: each page needs a unique one. A missing tag reduces your chances of getting the click.
- Mobile speed: Google indexes the mobile version of your site first. A slow page on a phone penalises all your rankings.
Free tool: download the free version of Screaming Frog. Enter your site URL and in a few minutes it generates a complete list of all your pages with their status (200, 301, 404), their missing tags and their redirect chains. The free limit covers 500 URLs, which is more than enough for a small company.
Duplicate content and canonical tags
Duplicate content is the most frequent and the least visible problem in technical audits. It is not necessarily about copy and paste: a site that generates the same page under different URLs depending on filters or parameters creates duplicate content without meaning to. The canonical tag settles the matter by telling Google which URL to treat as the reference version. For handling 404 errors and redirects, our article on 301 redirects and missing pages sets out the procedure step by step.
Practical tip: in Google Search Console, the 'Pages' tab lists the reasons for exclusion from the index. If you see 'Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user', that is Google itself telling you there is a problem to settle.
To test your site's speed and mobile experience, PageSpeed Insights and web.dev offer free reports with prioritised recommendations. If speed is one of your projects, our article on page speed optimisation gives you the concrete actions to put in place.